Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Steen, of South Burlington, who is retired and first wrote about John Dewey 55 years ago when he was a doctoral candidate in NYU’s Philosophy Department. His first career was scholar and teacher of philosophy, followed by a 20-year career in health care planning, health regulation and public health, ending as a professor of health policy and a private consultant. He is immediate past president of the American Health Planning Association.
[C]olumbus’ men brought the idea of democracy with them, the idea realized in ancient Athens, Greece, some 2,000 years earlier, but it was already here having been established in the Iroquois Confederacy 350 years earlier. Today we wonder if it will last, and even whether we still have it.
At a time when there is spreading alarm over the breakdown of democracy in the country manifested in symptoms like our growing political polarization, unfair election system, low voter turnouts, and depreciation of public education, we can gain important insight from the thinking of a native Vermonter, John Dewey.
John Dewey (1859-1952) grew up in Burlington, attended public schools there, studied philosophy at the University of Vermont, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at Johns Hopkins. He is often regarded as the most American of philosophers, and he was the most influential American philosopher of his time. He was a pragmatist and a philosopher of education who looked to teachers to develop the critical thinking and the cooperative abilities of schoolchildren, believing that would produce citizens best able to contribute new ideas as members of a participatory democracy. Democracy was Dewey’s moral ideal for political and social life. He saw it as a work in progress, and education as the means to building and improving it by enhancing individuals’ capacity to participate in it.
Democracy is essentially a system of government in which the most important decisions about governing the nation are made by all of the people collectively. Dewey wrote that “the foundation of democracy is faith in the capacities of human nature; faith in human intelligence and in the power of pooled and cooperative experience.” He taught that democracy exists in the minds and hearts of the people as their faith and their aspiration, or it doesn’t exist, so growing cynicism about democracy is its worst enemy. Dewey understood that democracy is a “way of life” that must be constantly recreated and nurtured through a culture of everyday cooperative practices in order to survive.
We see Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863) as the greatest expression of democracy in our history, expressing the belief that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Dewey’s contribution to it was to caution that we the people will enjoy the power of democratic self governance only if we accept our moral responsibility to participate in that government.
With the start of the Depression, he argued that social change can only be brought about by changing the power structure of society. In his best known statement, he wrote, “As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. The only remedy is new political action based on social interests and realities.” In his essay, “Imperative Need: A New Radical Party,” Dewey spoke to us in terms more trenchantly truthful than anything we hear or read in mass media today. In it, he identified democracy’s enemies as “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda,” and advised that “in order to restore democracy, one thing and one thing only is essential. The people will rule when they have power, and they will have power in the degree they own and control the land, the banks, the producing and distributing agencies of the nation.” The redistribution of power in society was the first principle of his route to fully realizing democracy, and he hoped that the kind of education he advocated would undermine the power of business over politics.
In his campaign speeches today, we hear Sen. Bernie Sanders calling himself a “democratic socialist” and espousing some of the same thinking. He has even called his policies the “unfinished business of the New Deal era.” In his new book, “Where We Go From Here,” he quotes Lincoln at Gettysburg to describe the Democratic Party he wants it to become, “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
One of Dewey’s favorite teachings was, “Democracy begins in conversation.” I don’t think there is an educational process better for that than the Vermont town meeting, our own institution of direct democracy, in which we learn citizenship through civic engagement while building social capital. And UVM’s analysis of Vermont town meetings shows that democracy is alive and well here (“In Vermont, the State of Democracy is Strong”) https://www.uvm.edu/cas/news/vermont-state-democracy-strong .
I think we have John Dewey to thank for much of Vermont’s enduring faith in democracy.
